Page 74 of Pretty Nightmare

“Just keep the light steady. The sooner I get done, the sooner we go home.”

“We’re gonna miss breakfast. They’re gonna know we were gone.”

I love her accent. It’s soft and barely there. But it is there. She didn’t pick it up here. She’s barely spent any time in Louisiana after I took her away. And we’ve only been back a few short months.

So she picked it up from me. And I like that because she didn’t inherit anything else of mine.

I forgot I had an accent, to be honest. People do that. Sometimes one never even knows they have one until they are told. But that’s like the chicken and the egg in a way. Which one of us has the accent? The one who notices or the one who doesn’t?

This might not be a deep philosophical question, but it’s worth some casual consideration while I dig up this grave.

“How much deeper can it be?” Maggie yawns. “I’m tired.”

“I figure this is deep enough, to be honest.” I pause my digging and lean on my shovel. Wipe the sweat from my brow. “But there’s nothing here.”

Maggie doesn’t respond. Just rolls over on her back and sighs, making sure that the lantern is still shining down on my work area. “Why do we need this body again?”

“I don’t need the body, Maggie. That’s gross. I just need what’s inside the coffin.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?”

I shrug even though she can’t see me. “One comes with the other, I suppose. But no. It’s not the same.”

She rolls back over again. The light disappears, then it’s back, and she’s hanging her head down into the gravesite. “He was your twin brother?”

I nod.

“But he died at birth?”

“Near enough. I was told he lived a day or two.”

“And your mama died too?”

“Correct.”

“Well, Adam.” She sighs again and pouts her lips at me. “That’s all very sad.”

I shoot her a dirty look for calling me Adam, but don’t say nothin’. She knows I hate it. And telling her again, for the hundredth and first time, isn’t gonna change her mind about using that name in situations that call for it.

And this, she must feel, is a situation that calls for it.

I did drag her out of bed at midnight, drive her two and a half hours down to New Orleans, and make her carry a pickax and a lantern over here to Holt Cemetery. And for the past hour and a half she’s been tasked with holding the light steady as I dig up my twin brother’s grave.

She is my partner in crime.

Has been since the very beginning.

It’s all kinds of wrong. I really do understand that. But I’m really just trying to do what’s best for her. And sure, some people might argue that having your six-year-old help you dig up a grave in the middle of the night is borderline child abuse, but if we find what we’re looking for these secrets will keep her alive one day.

God. I’m getting really good at rationalizing.

“I’m sorry, peachface. Maybe we should just go home?”

“No. No. No.” She gets up on her knees and lowers the lantern down into the hole. It’s deep. Past my waist. “We’re already here.” She swings the lantern around, searching for signs of a coffin. Then she looks over her shoulder. “There’s a headstone right there that says Aiden Boucher. It has to be close. Right?”

“You would think.” But this gravesite has always bothered me. Why here? We have a family mausoleum not far from Old Home. But this is where poor Aiden got dumped. It never did make sense, but I stopped trying to figure my father out long before I helped him get killed.

“Do they bury babies six feet deep too?”